Chinese Explorers 'Discovered America'? 822
FLY9999 writes: "According to British historian and map expert Gavin Menzies, Chinese explorers discovered America way before Columbus did. He will disclose his information to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at a conference next week."
Re:Eric the Red (Score:2, Informative)
Here's details (with maps) [enchantedlearning.com] of some of the early explorations.
Description of Zheng He's fleet from book (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eric the Red (Score:1, Informative)
Eric the Red (Eirikur Raudi) was banished from Iceland as an outlaw and his son Leif the LUCKY (Leifur Heppni or Leifur Eiriksson) was the one
to discover Vineland (North America). Someone wrongly stated that this happend about 1400 A.D. when it in fact it was about 1000 A.D.
Contrary to another post neither of them discovered Iceland. It was Ingolfur Arnarson or even before him Papean monks about 800 A.D.
And yes contrary to what Disneyworld says Leif the Lucky is Icelandic and not Norweigan!!
here is a website that tells you the whole story and it even mentions the fashionably late Columbus. http://www.dalir.is/leif/
Best regards...
An angry Icelandic Viking named Eric
The ancient Egyptians discovered Australia (Score:2, Informative)
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Actually, the Egyptians discovered [crystalinks.com] New South Wales between 1779 and 2748 BC. Hieroglyphic carvings in Hunter Valley, 100 km north of Sydney, relate how Djes-eb, one of the sons of the Pharaoh Ra Djedef, died from a snake bite.
Australia also appears on the map of Eratosthenes [henry-davis.com], compiled in 194 BC. This Erasthosthenes was the same person who devised the famous method of calculating prime numbers, still used as a benchmark today.
Living in peace (Score:1, Informative)
Re:people form Oceania got there first (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look at the homepage of the Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo [kon-tiki.no].
Heyerdahl (who btw. now in his eigthies are still active digging up a historic settlement in Russia I believe, and overseeing excavations of pyramids on Sicily, the Canary islands and South America), sailed from Peru in 1947 to Raroia in Polynesia to prove that settlements in the South Pacific could have originated with explorers from South America.
Btw. The movie about Kon-Tiki won an Oscar for best documentary in 1950 I believe.
What you might be thinking about was Ra I and Ra II from 1969, where he tried to prove that South America may have been populated by boat from Africa, since South America is within reach of Morocco by Papyrus boats built after ancient Egyptian design. Ra I almost reached Barbados, and Ra II succeeded.
He also did a fourth voyage on Tigris, a boat built to show that there could have been cultural exchange historically between the old cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus valley and Egypt via the see. The voyage wasn't completed because of the Iran/Iraq war.
You're right in linking Heyerdahl to the Easter Island, though, as he did lead an expedition there as well, trying among other things to link his theories of expeditions from South America closer to findings on Easter Island.
Central for Heyerdahl is that he believes that there has been much wider cultural exchanges between ancient cultures than what are known today, and that many cultures had much more extensive sea faring experience than many believe.
Chinese nautical technology (Score:5, Informative)
Here is one quote relevant to your question:
Even 163 metres is only 530 feet, of course, but it shows that 1000 feet isn't that unbelieveable.Danny.
Re:Umm...what about the Native Americans (Score:2, Informative)
You should take class about Native American societies, or at least read an authoritative work on the subject. The Iroquois people did indeed participate in the kind of 'genetic cleansing' that Europeans were also guilty of - granted both cleansings were directly or indirectly the result of viral warfare.
Let me explain, when European explorers started to settle and explore in North America they brought diseases with them that the Native population had been isolated from for centuries, if not millenia. These diseases wreaked tremendous havoc on the Natives - killing up 98% of the population! Often these deaths would occur after explorers (or a ship with an infected crewman sailing up the Ohio river) had past. When subsequent settlers would follow they would find the land almost empty of Natives, this led to the rise of the "virgin land" myth that claimed that the New World was underused, practically devoid of a Native population, and was ripe for the picking. Even the Puritans who settled in what would become New England took the fact that Native villages whose former population was dead in their streets was a sign from God that he was clearing out the country for his believers.
Ok ok, enough digressing. Now, The Iroquois people had a particular empassioned ritual called a Mourning War. When a member of their tribe was killed they would enter into this war against the tribe that had killed their citizen and exact retribution - sometimes capturing a member of the opposing tribe to serve as a substitute for the fallen, sometimes killing the one that had killed their person, or just killing someone in the opposing tribe.
When the Iroquois tribe was slaughtered by smallpox and other nasty diseases, the tribe entered into a Mourning War out of grief and loss and indiscriminately slaughtered their neighboring tribes until King Phillip's War disrupted the region.
Now take a look at a South Carolinian tribe (sorry, I don't recall their name) - they captured and made slaves of tribes to the south and southwest, later making a business out of it by selling slaves to the Europeans.
None of this is to excuse the Europeans, but the relationship between the multitude of Native Tribes and the differing nationalities of the Europeans was MUCH more complicated than an exploiter/exploited dichotomy. esult of viral warfare. Let me explain, when European explorers started to settle and explore in North America they brought diseases with them that the Native population had been isolated from for centuries, if not millenia. These diseases wreaked tremendous havoc on the Natives - killing up 98% of the population! Often these deaths would occur after explorers (or a ship with an infected crewman sailing up the Ohio river) had past. When subsequent settlers would follow they would find the land almost empty of Natives, this led to the rise of the "virgin land" myth that claimed that the New World was underused, practically devoid of a Native population, and was ripe for the picking. Even the Puritans who settled in what would become New England took the fact that Native villages whose former population was dead in their streets was a sign from God that he was clearing out the country for his believers.
Ok ok, enough digressing. Now, The Iroquois people had a particular empassioned ritual called a Mourning War. When a member of their tribe was killed they would enter into this war against the tribe that had killed their citizen and exact retribution - sometimes capturing a member of the opposing tribe to serve as a substitute for the fallen, sometimes killing the one that had killed their person, or just killing someone in the opposing tribe.
When the Iroquois tribe was slaughtered by smallpox and other nasty diseases, the tribe entered into a Mourning War out of grief and loss and indiscriminately slaughtered their neighboring tribes until King Phillip's War disrupted the region.
Now take a look at a South Carolinian tribe (sorry, I don't recall their name) - they captured and made slaves of tribes to the south and southwest, later making a business out of it by selling slaves to the Europeans.
None of this is to excuse the Europeans, but the relationship between the multitude of Native Tribes and the differing nationalities of the Europeans was MUCH more complicated than an exploiter/exploited dichotomy. Though in some cases, like the Cherokee removal of the 1830's, that relationship is practically right on. You just can't speak of the Native population as a cohesive group with one ideology, method of governing, culture, etc. Before the coming of Europeans there were 12,000 languages spoken in North America that we know of, of course the sound, grammer, and vocabulary of practically all of those languages is now, sadly, lost to us. The Tribes of North America were as, or more, varied than the countries of Europe (which, I assume, you already know not to group as one culture even though you seemed to indicate such in your posting).
Re:unlikely (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
And 80% of the Native American mortality wasn't due to slavery, or genocide, or the use of biological weapons. It was due to the fact that Native Americans had no resistance to common, resistable diseases among Europeans, like the flu. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the Willamette Valley - the first white guys to see alot of America - almost 90% of the valley population had been killed by diseases spread from Native American population to Native American population across the continent. Not smallpox, which never reached the Willamette valley, but primarily the flu.
The Native Americans were no more peaceful than any other people on earth. In fact, a half-dozen or so various confederations were bloodily at war when the Europeans arrived. The Incans and Aztects brutally enslaved and murdered hundreds of thousands of people, allowing the Spaniards to pick up huge armies of allies when they marched upon these empires - because the Native Americans hated each other so much.
They were not peaceful or noble or any different than any other human population you care to look at. The only difference between them and, say, all the native peoples the Assyrians wiped out is that some subset of Americans has decided to engage in self-flagellation over the issue.
Max
Re:Chinese nautical technology (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The ancient Egyptians discovered Australia (Score:2, Informative)
"Unintentionally bringing disease"? (Score:2, Informative)
What? That wasn't in your high school history books? How could that be???
That, my friend, is a textbook example of genocide by European settlers upon the native populations. And a textbook example of how history is written by the victors.
...anactofgod...